Soulbinding Like a State

Identity wants to emerge

Over the long run, any stable joinable key becomes an identity as it accumulates more correlated information about you.

We see this today in the ads ecosystem, where data brokers and cross-site advertising networks use data joining to correlate information about you and track you around the internet. Email addresses, cookies... See more

Scott details a pattern of disaster that repeatedly manifests around legibility. His opening example is from the late-18th century discipline of “scientific forestry”.

A natural forest is illegible. A tangle of plants. This is inconvenient from the standpoint of harvesting lumber. How do you quantify yield? Can you even make a meaningful map of this... See more

What’s missing from our map? Everything else. The forest has been made legible to lumber production. In the process, the entire ecological web of trees, shrubs, birds, bugs, moss, soil microbiota are stripped away. They didn’t fit into our map.

By the second generation of planting, there is a noticeable decline in forest health. Within one century: ... See more

The important thing from a logging-into-software perspective is not who you are, but what you are authorized to do. So, Keys, not IDs.

When I reflect on the lived experience of identity, I think of something that is complex, personal, intersectional, situational, intersubjective. It seems like the thing we are gesturing toward when we say “on-chain identity” is not this personal lived experience of identity, but something else. What is it?

A natural forest is illegible. A tangle of plants. This is inconvenient from the standpoint of harvesting lumber. How do you quantify yield? Can you even make a meaningful map of this mess? Much easier to clear the forest and plant a legible “scientific” forest. Uniform rows of trees that produce good lumber. Now we can count the trees, make a map,... See more